After Delays, Digital Television Conversion is Complete

Jonathan Collegio, what do we know about the people who have not may the conversion yet? Who are they? Where are they? How worried are we?

JONATHAN COLLEGIO, vice president, digital transition, National Association of Broadcasters: As of last Friday, about 1.7 million television viewers had not taken any action toward the digital television transition. We expect that many of those folks would have taken action in the last week. However, we know that a good proportion of them are very, very resistant to taking the action. Some of the folks may just choose to do without television for a while. So, we will see what happens. So far, television stations across the country have been receiving between about 100 and 125 telephone calls, which is right about what our expectations have been.

JEFFREY BROWN: And every time we look at this, we get people writing into us afterwards, complaining, saying that they have made the conversion, but the signal is no better than it was before. What is the explanation?

JONATHAN COLLEGIO: Well, what we have seen in our surveys is that, actually, 75 percent of viewers who have made the transition report better pictures, more reception, actually being able to get more channels. I think that what -- what you are seeing is probably some of the folks on the fringes who are losing reception are a little bit angrier. And those are the folks who are a little more prone to complain.

JEFFREY BROWN: All right, now, Reed Hundt, I want to look at some larger context here, because, as I recall, this all started as -- out of a fear of Japanese competition in the '80s, correct? What was the -- what was the big idea? And what has been accomplished?

REED HUNDT, former chairman, Federal Communications Commission: Well, I think, to be honest, very, very little has been accomplished. And the big idea is an idea that long ago evaporated. The original notion 20 years ago is that America would have a TV manufacturing industry that would be able to be geared up to deliver a new signal over the air. Before the broadcast surge really made much progress with that, that industry moved overseas. Now China is the number-one center for manufacture of TVs in the world. And, over the years since then, the broadcast industry has fought to postpone and postpone and postpone this conversion. And now that it's actually happening, 98 percent of Americans won't even notice, because they are cable subscribers or satellite subscribers or Internet users.

JEFFREY BROWN: Well, so what was -- what was this all about?

JONATHAN COLLEGIO: Twenty million households at the beginning of the transition, when we started keeping track in 2006, on our way to the transition in February -- what was February 17, 2009, had to make the upgrade. What we know is that most people that are making the transition are getting a lot of benefits from this. They are getting crystal-clear pictures and sound that you can't get in analog, more television channels through multicasting, as well as free high-definition broadcasts in every single market in the country. Now, that didn't exist 10 years ago. That didn't really even exist five years ago. And it is a benefit that folks can enjoy anywhere for free. All they need is an antenna and an HD television set. So, there are a lot of benefits for viewers out there. And I think that you may see, with the economy the way it is, some shift back to over-the-air, instead of those cable and satellite bills.

REED HUNDT: Over-the-air broadcast was the most important medium in the world, and certainly in the United States for the last half of the 20th century. But it's definitely a 20th century story, and not a 21st century story. The broadcast industry, for years, knew that it had to evolve its business model. But it's pretty analogous to General Motors or some of the other sad stories we see, where there was postponement after postponement after postponement sought by the people in the industry. And the result is that the value proposition, the center of gravity for the media switched to the Internet, switched to mobile devices. People now get all the same information on a mobile device that they could have formally gotten on broadcast TV. And then they can Twitter on it as well.

JEFFREY BROWN: So, technology did a kind of end run, you are suggesting, around the television set that we're all familiar with?

REED HUNDT: Technology just kept moving on, while the lobbying battle got stuck in a rut for 20 years. And now we're having a transition from something to nothing that really matters.

JONATHAN COLLEGIO: What I would hate to do is make a prediction of what the technology is going to look like 20 years ago, because a lot of folks, back in the '80s, thought that they knew what the future was going to look like, and they got it wrong. What we know now is that there's a huge movement, like he said, toward handheld devices. In Washington, D.C., this summer, seven television stations are actually going to begin an experiment on mobile broadcast television on handheld devices. This is a huge step forward. It's going to be available for consumers in the -- in the first quarter of 2010. But there's definitely this push toward -- toward mobile handheld devices, getting -- being able to get your local news as you are going home from work, that type of thing. There's a lot of -- there -- there are a lot of opportunities there. I just wouldn't want to try to predict what the -- you know, what technology is going to look like in 2029.

JEFFREY BROWN: But just -- excuse me -- just to be clear, so that those handhelds, the connection to the set in our homes is what?

JONATHAN COLLEGIO: Oh, it's still there. I mean, we know that in the last -- 112 (sic) digital television sets have been sold, according to the Consumer Electronics Association, more than half of those in the last two years. So, folks still place a very, very high importance on their -- on their television in their homes. But what we will start seeing are mobile devices like this, where you are actually able to pick up local broadcasts on a mobile handheld device. If it's popular in Washington, D.C., you could see them in cell phones, you could see them in iPods, and all kinds of other devices as well.

JEFFREY BROWN: Well, you have watched the policy and other debates for years now. What kind of future do you see? What is the next step for the television set and this kind of technology?

REED HUNDT: We're in complete agreement. A cool thing is to have over-the-air broadcasts go to cell phones. More chips have been sold in China for the receipt of over-the-air broadcasts on cell phones than the total number of iPhones sold in the world. But, again, my only point is, that's already happened in China. And, here in the United States, this is a prototype that we're looking at today. We need to get our industries in every sector on the cutting edge of technology change. And, frankly, this delay, delay, delayed transition from analog TV is a sad story in American policy, not a great story.